So we had a small setback with Wikipedia, as their courteous but super-efficient editors, decided to remove the article I blogged about before. Reason: the Elyssa Alphabet needs to reach a certain level of notability before it can be considered Wikipedia-worthy. I guess we have some work ahead of us.

A few days ago, I’ve published a new article on Wikipedia about TUNI1259’s Elyssa Alphabet. Now that it is out there, the Elyssa Alphabet is now YOUR alphabet, go ahead and use it! Let everyone know that you write Tunisian in the Latin alphabet, or “niktib b’it-Tùnsi, naqra b’it-Tùnsi”. Here’s the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Latin_alphabet.

Just yesterday, I finished translating a children’s book from English to Tunisian. “Kùrti il-ħamra“, or “My red ball”, is the first book written in the Elyssa Alphabet (aka Tunisian Latin alphabet). It’s free, so please download it and share it around. And don’t forget to let me know your impressions. Find the eBook here: http://www.africanstorybook.org/index.php?id=15151.

The Arabic script has always favored the writer: you can write a whole multi-volume encyclopedia without ever having to worry about representing a single ċakl (vowel). It’s usually up to the readers to figure out where a fatħa, a kasra or a đamma should go. And if they can’t… well, let them eat consonant soup. Convenient, isn’t it? Doubly convenient when the writer him/herself doesn’t know what ċakl should go where. What better script is there to hide grammatical ignorance than the Arabic script.

This is what we, at the TUNI1259 Institute, call the “Dictatorship of the Writer”. And we set out to revolutionize this. We are for “writing of the reader, by the reader, for the reader”.

There are two ways we could go about this:

Make sure that all texts written in the Arabic script contain ċakl; or

Write Tunisian language texts in a script that forces the writer to represent vowels.

For option 1, writers have had about 14 centuries to make an effort and comply. The best they could come up with is to make ċakl mandatory for religious texts, as if religious texts were the only texts worthy of being read correctly. Dr Mohamed Maamouri delves deeper into the problem of vocalization of the Arabic script in his 1998 report entitled Language Education and Human Development: Arabic Diglossia and Its Impact on the Quality of Education in the Arab Region.

That said, whenever the Institute has to produce texts in the Arabic script, we will produce them fully vocalized. That’s our promise to our readers.

However, TUNI1259 is actively promoting option 2: a Latin script for the Tunisian language. It has been done in the 1920’s for Maltese (a neo-Arabic language), we see no reason why it couldn’t be done for the Tunisian language (or, for that matter, any other neo-Arabic language). The Latin script has many advantages, especially in the 21st century, least of all is that it puts the onus on the writer to represent the vowels, otherwise their precious text is unintelligible.

This leave us with a dilemma: which vowels should be represented? When is /a/ an [a] or an [e]? And when is /u/ an [o]? Stay posted.